


The Divine Miss Mandy

by amyfortuna



Category: Velvet Goldmine
Genre: Bisexual Female Character, Bisexuality, F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-26
Updated: 2010-12-26
Packaged: 2017-10-14 03:05:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/144655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amyfortuna/pseuds/amyfortuna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mandy Slade has always been queer. It's in her blood.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Divine Miss Mandy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [extemporally (hidebehindtrees)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hidebehindtrees/gifts).



She was fourteen years old when Desiree Hopkins walked into her classroom, all long dark hair wavy down her back and white sweater setting off her pale skin just perfectly. Mandy glanced up from the math problems she was working on and was instantly smitten.

Within a month, they’d formed a fast friendship, had a sleepover, kissed each other, awkwardly, a little tenderly, and quarrelled when Mandy wanted to go further and Desiree didn’t.

Within three months, Mandy had chopped her brown hair short and was dating a man more than half again her age. And within a year, she’d dumped him and was dating the girl she’d later call her first love, Sandy Summers. The gossip ran rampant about ‘Sandy ‘n’ Mandy, the lesbians’ for months, and finally Mandy’s parents decided to move to England. Mandy always believed it was to break them up, although she later learned that her father had been given a new job in London and had wanted to move back for years.

At the age of sixteen, in London, Mandy found her way to the Sombrero Club in Kensington and met Jack Fairy, the reigning star. And at the age of eighteen, Christmas 1968, her parents were both killed in a car crash and Mandy was left to fend for herself, which she did by promptly spending nearly all her inheritance on buying the Sombrero Club from the impoverished previous owner, enough for him to move to Ibiza, and spending the rest on a makeover for the club in preparation for it to become the glitter haven of the 1970s.

It was maybe just that she hadn’t had time for relationships in a while (plenty of sex, that was always available to the owner of the queerest club in London) but at the age of twenty, on the cusp of a new decade, she found a new purpose, and that was Brian Slade. Three months after they met, she married him, and she sold the club to fund his career before another six months had passed. She ploughed everything into being the perfect rock star wife, supportive, radiant.

She believed in Brian Slade, and Mandy wasn’t given to believing in pipe dreams. She always made the dreams come true, by sheer will alone if she had to. There was no sacrifice too great.

But the one thing she never calculated on was Brian. And when it all came crashing down, it wasn’t just that she had been forgotten, but that she had been betrayed. She’d given him everything and he’d thrown it away on a fake death, on coke, on everything but her. He’d used and abused her trust, her faith, her money.

New York wasn’t a haven or a refuge, but it was somewhere new. She fled London like it was burning, a shadow of herself. And in the next dark five years, she found the strength to begin again, that indomitable will reasserting itself.

She found a bar where a hostess with a touch of naughty humour was welcomed, and appeared there every night, telling jokes ten years old, watching the world go grey and pale. Even the weather seemed grey when Reynolds was elected and she wondered where all the rainbows had gone.

In the misty spring of 1982, a familiar face walked through the door of the bar late one afternoon, and Mandy found her heart leaping when Sandy Summers, looking hardly a day older, said hello. Her heart dropped through her shoes, though, when she found out Sandy had cancer and was dying with barely a year left.

“I got married to this guy, but it was all fake,” Sandy said softly, as they sat together over Scotch. “I never stopped thinking about you, and when I got the diagnosis, I couldn’t pretend anymore. So I left him, and here I am.”

“Here you are,” Mandy said, and leaning forward, kissed her.

Sandy died in June of 1983, after a little more than a year together. The world seemed even more grey and cold and empty. Everything and everyone she loved was gone.

Mandy, standing by the gravestone of her first and last love, flung up her head in the bitter wind, and somehow found the will to carry on.


End file.
